America’s Worst Colleges for Free Speech on Campus
With the beginning of the new school year, students and parents are flocking to newsstands to pick up the “America’s Best Colleges” issue of U.S. News & World Report to see how their schools of interest stack up to the others. This year, they’ll be getting another piece of information as well: a list of America’s worst colleges for liberty on campus. Students who are planning to attend Brandeis University, Bucknell University, Colorado College, Johns Hopkins University, Michigan State University, and Tufts University should think twice before attending those schools if they care about their fundamental rights.
This is the second year in a row that FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (where I work), has placed a full-page ad right next to the U.S. News rankings to warn students about what can happen to their liberties on campus and the colleges where these travesties are most likely to occur.
The ad features the shocking story of Keith John Sampson, a student and employee at Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), who was found guilty of racial harassment for reading a book that celebrates how University of Notre Dame students defeated the Ku Klux Klan in a 1924 street fight. The apparent basis for Sampson’s offense? The book has a picture of a KKK rally on the cover, and he chose to read it while sitting at a table during work breaks, thereby offending other employees.
That’s right. Administrators at an American public university actually judged a book by its cover. FIRE was able to help restore Sampson’s good name, but the case remains a disturbing example of the out-of-control political correctness that is rife on too many campuses.
While Sampson’s story is appalling, IUPUI is not on FIRE’s Red Alert list of the “worst of the worst” offenders against liberty in America because it did come around once FIRE and the ACLU got involved. Bucknell, Brandeis, Colorado College, Hopkins, Michigan State, and Tufts did not even do that — and the stories there are nearly as shameful.
For instance, Bucknell University, the newest addition to the list, censored a conservative group’s satire of President Obama’s stimulus plan (the group passed out fake “stimulus dollars,” which Bucknell apparently could not abide) and an “affirmative action bake sale” protest. After administrators shut down the affirmative action bake sale because — get this — the students were charging less than they said they would for doughnuts, the students reapplied to conduct the protest. However, they were told they could only discuss affirmative action in a debate format with the other side. Based on this principle, we can presumably expect President Obama to be surrendering the White House lectern to Michael Steele at his next press conference.
Brandeis University, which is now in its second year on the list, found a professor of nearly 50 years guilty of racial harassment for using the word “wetbacks” in his Latin American Politics class — in the context of criticizing the term. Colorado College, another offending institution two years running, found two male students guilty of sexually related “violence” simply for posting a flyer that satirized another flyer circulated by a student group. Their crime? The male students mentioned both sex and guns (separately) in their flyer making fun of the “Feminist and Gender Studies Interns” flyer.
Johns Hopkins suspended a student for what it deemed to be an “offensive” Halloween party invitation posted on Facebook and then passed a repressive “civility” code over the protests of student leaders. Michigan State, currently in its first year on the list, found a student government leader guilty of “spamming” after she e-mailed a whopping eight percent of the faculty (in total, not even in one message) to encourage them to express their views on a proposed shortening of the school calendar.
And Tufts University found an entire student newspaper guilty of “harassment” for publishing two pieces, one satirizing affirmative action and the other commenting on Islamic Awareness Week. The latter of these two pieces included only factually verifiable information about Islam, as well as quotes from the Koran.
That’s right. At Tufts, quoting actual facts that some people would rather not know is considered “harassment,” giving a whole new meaning to the phrase “an inconvenient truth.”
All six of these universities will be admitting freshmen this year, many of whom will have no idea that they are surrendering their fundamental rights to those who have shown absolutely no concern for them. Thanks to FIRE’s advertisement in U.S. News, however, at least some of them may know going in that administrators at their schools have decided that the fundamental rights that they thought they would find at an institution of higher education — fundamental rights for which men and women fought and died — are less important than making sure that those on campus who are fortunate enough to hold the most “popular” views feel as comfortable and unchallenged as possible.
“feminist porn activist”??? oh man Colorado College must be really high…
)))
Restrictions on free speech are a shameful reminder of why we must all continue to support it and candidates that advocate it regardless of consequence. Free speech is what folks fought and died for…whether it be speech from your side, the extreme right or the extreme left or all in between.
Such absurdities are due in part to the fact that Universities live in the realm of theory. For them the idealism of communism, socialism, and other leftisms don’t have to make sense in practice. It is the thought that counts.
2. Poor Citizen:
I concur with you that free speech must be upheld, for extreme leftist such as yourself as well as for us in the center.
Our President is the product of the ivory tower university system that deals in abstract theory. That’s why he believes that merely saying illegal immigrants won’t be entitled to public health care insurance benefits will accomplish that goal with no enforcement mechanism; why he can say that government will be able to cut billions of fraud and abuse, cover tens of millions of new patients and be deficit neutral. He worked this all out on paper in the Oval Office and now thinks that his wishes will come true. If theory equalled practice, there wouldn’t be billions of dollars of fraud and abuse in Medicare and Medicaid in the first place! Being able to express noncontroversial ideas is no freedom at all. To have any meaning, free speech much include the right to upset and offend others who have different views.
“At Tufts, quoting actual facts that some people would rather not know is considered ‘harassment’, giving a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘an inconvenient truth’.”
This is nothing new in “progressive” circles, where facts are subordinated to “what feels good”, where “objective conditions” (the old Red Army term for “what’s really happening outside of HQ”) must bend to dogma, and if reality conflicts with theory, reality must be disposed of ASAP.
What amazes me is that people still do not understand that this is not an aberration in progressive behavior, but is in fact one of its most basic and immutable attributes, as E.E. “Doc” Smith might phrase it.
What astounds me even more is that once again, FIRE has missed two of the most consistently “politically correct to the point of illogicality” schools in the nation; namely, Ohio State University and Ohio University-Athens. As an example, possession of the book, “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism” is cause for “guidance counseling” on both campuses, and Al Gore’s and Michael Moore’s “documentaries” are a standard part of the curriculum. (Who cares if they’ve been repeatedly proven inaccurate? They Tell The Truth As Seen By Right-Thinking People, And That Is What Really Matters.)
I doubt that most people are “born” either “liberal”, “conservative”, or “moderate”. Most are the result of societal conditioning by family, friends, and teachers. In my case, I was more-or-less liberal until my teens, when I noticed that no matter what their stated intentions were, “liberal” or “progressive” politicians’ programs tended to fail consistently in the real world- and whenever they did so, their artificers never admitted error, but simply blamed everyone else for their own failures.
By the time I got to college (OU), I learned firsthand where and how they learned to do things this way. I came out as the slightly right-of-center moderate I’ve been ever since.
Yes, college is an enlightening experience. It’s just that sometimes, true “enlightenment” (of the “lights on in your head” sort) comes when you realize that the brand being sold by the “academic elite’” is in reality nothing but a potentially poisonous variety of snake oil.
clear ether
eon
The Academy was Number One on the list of the institutions through which the Sixties radicals were going to take their “long march.” They have succeeded beyond even their wettest dreams. Is there any other place where someone like Barack Obama, a radical non-entity, could become the editor of the law review?
The American university system is dead and gone and is never coming back unless and until normal people stop sending them money.
Don’t waste money on Dartmouth, folks. Go learn how to fix transmissions.
The emphasis should no longer be the saving of these politically correct universities. They are often too far gone. Their hard science departments may be salvageable—but not the softer curriculums. The lunatics running these academic institutions possess legal protections that make it virtually impossible to get rid of them. It is just too costly and time consuming. The only real answer is to build new universities catering to the liberal arts. There is nothing sacred about a school like Harvard University that guarantees it some sort of immortality. Many corporations have come and gone. Why not a major school?
These five schools would be a perfect place to start. Take away all of the federal funding for their professors’ research as well as any other funding from the Federal government that goes directly to the school. Then threaten to withhold any student funding as well if they don’t begin to respect the First Amendment by a certain date. And then withhold this money until they remove all of this crap.
And let them know that they will be watched and any reprisals will be dealt with. That will get their attention.
Even then, it’s going to be a job untangling the hard science from the herd science. Many ostensibly hard sciences (cough climatology cough) have become Galileo’s nightmare – where consensus is more important than evidence, and truth is dictated by the social order.
Some of the physical sciences have caught intellectual syphilis from the social sciences.
Many smaller colleges have gone. The problem with the Harvards and Yales is that they have too many alumni thinking that they’re doing a good thing by donating money, and they have foundations running in the billions. Given these academics’ understanding of economics, it’ll take them a while to burn through those billions, but don’t be surprised if Harvard goes TU after 400 years in the next decade or two; after all it wasn’t that long ago when a GM bankruptcy was unthinkable.
The state schools may be a harder nut to crack. They can keep feeding those beasts on taxpayer money indefinitely.
I’m wondering where Duke U is on the list – they have a terrible reputation, too.
I’m a recent graduate of Smith College (big mistake), and while I was there, the one and only conservative group on campus hosted a speaker who had written a book about why, in his opinion, people aren’t born gay. Personally, I think people are born gay, so I didn’t go to hear his talk. As it turns out, no one else got to hear it either, because a bunch of gay rights supporters climbed in the windows and started yelling so no one could hear him. (In a totally passe move, they started chanting, “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it” – where did they think they WERE, Stonewall? Time for a new slogan…)
I’m actually a very big supporter of gay rights, but I’m a bigger supporter of free speech. The people climbing in the windows and yelling came off as ridiculously immature, like little kids having a tantrum because someone said something they didn’t like. Way to fail, everyone.
It’s obvious the movie Animal House could not be updated into a sequel today; in fact, I doubt that even the original could be made today. Lampooning satire and sarcasm would hurt to many feelings and interfere with the good mental health status of American citizens on campus. But what can you expect from socialized higher education, a real tournament of ideas?
One way to untangle this mess of political correctness is to have the state legislatures strip the funding of the “studies” programs (Women’s, black, Chicano, Environmental, Gay, etc.) that came into being during the late 60′s and early 70′s from the states’ budgets. Take all of the funding away from these departments in a handful of public universities and prohibit them from transferring funding from other sources to these departments. In short, eliminate these programs. And tell the professors in those departments that they no longer are employed by the state government.
And all the while, explain that this is being done because these programs do not promote free expression nor do they provide students with the ability needed to analyze the problems that our society will face, and because of this, these departments have failed us and have to go. This is the sort of message that will resonate with the faculties in our public universities, and if they don’t get the message about taking the education of the next generation seriously, they will be the next ones to be tossed out into the street.
turfmonster – Stripping the funding from the lame victim studies programs is unlikely to happen, but, this recession resulting in no jobs for grads with frivolous degrees may gut them.
Thank heavens for small favors. At least Caltech & MIT passed the smell test.
Eon,
If people are being forced to undergo “counseling” at Ohio State or Ohio U for possession of a book, please let fire know. You can submit a case at http://thefire.org/cases/submit/ . We would need to know the names of specific people who have been “counseled” so we can contact them and get all the information.
The Affirmative Action Bake Sale worked great at UC Berkeley several years ago.
I wish conservative campus groups would stop doing silly things and approach issues more substantively, an “affirmative action” bake sale does nothing to advance our agenda and makes us look like a-holes.
Evan Maloney has this one under control with ‘Indoctrinate U’. The universities are a sham, and only getting hit in the wallet will make them change. Hopefully the economic toilet flush will cleanse the water of the people with useless degrees in ‘oppression studies.’ One can only hope.
Robert Shibley, please post regularly here, your work is very appreciated and far too many parents are still unaware of what our campuses are really like.
Campus suppression of free speech goes much deeper than these political conflicts. Liberal students(I mean the truly liberal and not all these regressives that like to call themselves progressives)are routinely given bad grades or requirements to re-do assignments, when they are offensive to the sensibilities of ‘progressive’ leftist professors. This is far more damaging to freedom of speech. The recipient of the discipline is being forced, by coercion, to provide answers and ideas which he/she does not believe are correct.
A Liberal Arts education used to mean something – an ability to think and reason.
These universities are truly lost. They were supposed to be places of ideas and thoughtful debate. Intellectual curiosity was to be fostered. Scientific Method was how ideas were evaluated. Worthy ideas moved on to theory, the disproven were discarded.
Now to study the Liberal Arts is to be indoctrinated into a rigid worldview and very specific philosophy. Gone is the ability to evaluate and reason. Too bad.
The average carpenters, plumbers, and soldiers I know are far deeper and more logical thinkers than the “intellectuals” at Law Schools and Liberal Arts departments.
I’m on the eve of attending college full time and value freedom of speech, logic, and reason. Any reccommendations? Maybe being self-taught is the way to go.
The disease, while well advanced in the academy, has infected the broader culture. This is why pointing out what Van Jones actually said or what John Kerry actually did is labeled a ‘smear’.
The only way this will stop is with violent retaliation.This stalinist regime was founded through violence(remeber the armed occupation of Cornell?),and can only be ended through compensatory violence.Let’s remember Thomas Jefferson and act.The first amendment doesn’t end in Acdemeia.
The good news is that a lot of businesses worth any salt ask two questions: Where did you graduate and what have you done outside of academics? If they can’t answer those two questions then they don’t get a job other than to ask want fries with that? That is, unless they become academics themselves stuck in the system teaching the next round of know-nothing professors. Call me rude, but I know for a fact those who can’t survive the real world end up teachers.
inrptrn – If you aren’t an evangelical or a conservative Catholic, the pickings are slim, but they’re out there.
Remember that even schools with current stupid decisions on their resumes may have good traditions of debate and discussion in general.
Online courses or community colleges allow you to acquire credits less expensively with less of the drivel. Alternatively, the strategies of putting one’s head down and just getting through it or intentionally looking for a school where these political idiocies can be made visible have also been used by many. Sticking with hard sciences and/or choosing your professors carefully after freshman year are also useful.
As to being self-taught, that has always been the way to go for both geniuses and cranks. The number of fields where this is acceptable will continue to grow, but we’re not there yet.
I’d trust this list if Bob Jones University was on there.
and the beat goes on……..uva65
Inrptrn -
Consider St. John’s College. There are two campuses – one in Annapolis and one in Santa Fe. No lectures, no textbooks. You read the classics and talk about them and form your own opinions. Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Darwin, Freud, Shakespeare, Hume, the Bible, etc. All instructors must teach all classes. All undergrads study Greek and Music as well as read the books.
I went there for graduate school. The student body was truly a mixture of left and right- maybe slightly more to the right in the grad school for some reason. I went to Yale during the 1980s and it is true that the student body was very left leaning, but I took an amazing class by a conservative professor named Barry Shain, called “Conservative Critics of Modernity.”
Me, I’m kind of small ‘c’ conservative in some ways but liberal socially – I don’t think it matters who sleeps with whom, and I think bringing prayer back into schools would make most people of faith unhappy because their kids would come home saying the rosary, or talking about Joseph Smith, or speaking in tongues. Plus, I remember back when I was a kid and we’d sing Christmas carols the Jewish kids would have to sit in the hall if they didn’t want to sing about something that was against their religion. I don’t really want to go back to that. A good start would be teaching the constitution and critical thinking in school.
8. David Thomson:
There is nothing sacred about a school like Harvard University that guarantees it some sort of immortality.
~~~~
Considering the underlying reason for most college establishments was virtuous religious training, the classical system of western education (now all but abandoned), I’m sure John Harvard is rolling in his grave at what has become of his legacy.
20. Joseph:
I wish conservative campus groups would stop doing silly things and approach issues more substantively, an “affirmative action” bake sale does nothing to advance our agenda and makes us look like a-holes.
~~~
Oh, the petition to end women’s suffrage worked great at Univeristy of Vermont. They had great response – especially from women. (but their point was how little civics were taught in civics class that almost NO ONE knew what they were signing.)
It looks like nothing has changed for the better since I graduated from school. Only gotten worse, if anything. Liberal-Arts professors don’t get paid to deal with real-world problems with real-world research. They are paid to read books and teach kids through those same books, the ones written by their leftist friends for their leftist friends and their leftist agendas.
I took a sociology class on political-sociology intro. We read a bunch of Marx, Weber, etc. My prof had never worked outside of school except at the pizza parlor as an undergrad. He loved Max Weber and his leftism. I actually got him to admit that Weber and Marx were wrong when it came to human nature. However, he wouldn’t do it in front of the other students, only when we were in his office alone.
The antithesis of that prof was this old guy that taught Politics of the Soviet Union. Great old guy from Czechoslovakia, and an aide to the Prime Minister Edvard Benes. He had met Hitler, Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt during WWII. He was also under the death pentalty by the Soviet regime because he had escaped after the war from them when they took control of Czechoslavakia. Anyway, he hated communisits with a passion. I never could get one of the leftist profs to debate Mr. Taborsky.
I am surprised that a ranking of the worst colleges for free speech doesn’t include such shining luminaries as Bob Jones University, Liberty University, and Regent University.
” “At Tufts, quoting actual facts that some people would rather not know is considered ‘harassment’, giving a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘an inconvenient truth’.”
This is nothing new in “progressive” circles, where facts are subordinated to “what feels good”, where “objective conditions” (the old Red Army term for “what’s really happening outside of HQ”) must bend to dogma, and if reality conflicts with theory, reality must be disposed of ASAP.
What amazes me is that people still do not understand that this is not an aberration in progressive behavior, but is in fact one of its most basic and immutable attributes, as E.E. “Doc” Smith might phrase it.
What astounds me even more is that once again, FIRE has missed two of the most consistently “politically correct to the point of illogicality” schools in the nation; namely, Ohio State University and Ohio University-Athens. As an example, possession of the book, “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism” is cause for “guidance counseling” on both campuses, and Al Gore’s and Michael Moore’s “documentaries” are a standard part of the curriculum. (Who cares if they’ve been repeatedly proven inaccurate? They Tell The Truth As Seen By Right-Thinking People, And That Is What Really Matters.)
I doubt that most people are “born” either “liberal”, “conservative”, or “moderate”. Most are the result of societal conditioning by family, friends, and teachers. In my case, I was more-or-less liberal until my teens, when I noticed that no matter what their stated intentions were, “liberal” or “progressive” politicians’ programs tended to fail consistently in the real world- and whenever they did so, their artificers never admitted error, but simply blamed everyone else for their own failures.
By the time I got to college (OU), I learned firsthand where and how they learned to do things this way. I came out as the slightly right-of-center moderate I’ve been ever since.
Yes, college is an enlightening experience. It’s just that sometimes, true “enlightenment” (of the “lights on in your head” sort) comes when you realize that the brand being sold by the “academic elite’” is in reality nothing but a potentially poisonous variety of snake oil.
clear ether
eon
”
Well said, eon, I grew up in a liberal environment as well and graduated from University of Wisconsin- Madison two years ago; One of the more liberal universities in America. It wasnt until I got out in the ‘real world’ and actually started working that I realized how absurd some of the professors were in promoting their liberal ideologies. I actually had a professor who tried to promote the ‘wonders’ of marxism and the ‘evils’ of capitalism. I kind of wish I could go back and counter his arguments.
Ben
The University of North Carolina would have made this list before they cured this annoying disorder:
UNC finds cure for Political Incorrectness
http://garygaddy.tripod.com/blog/index.blog?from=20070308